The other day a colleague and friend of mine, Peter Boros, had a case where one of our clients had to track down the process shutting down MySQL. This blog is based on the discussion we had about that internally.

Our client wanted Peter to identify the culprit behind periodic shutdowns. This proved to be slightly more difficult than usual, for reasons that you might guess from the title of this blog.

Here is what Peter saw in the logs:

150928 15:15:33 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Normal shutdown
150928 15:15:36 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events
150928 15:15:39 [Warning] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Forcing close of thread 411515  user: 'dashboard'
150928 15:15:40  InnoDB: Starting shutdown...
150928 15:15:59  InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 4873840375
150928 15:16:00 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown …

Have you ever had a case where you needed to find a process which sent a HUP/KILL/TERM or other signal to your database? Let me rephrase. Did you ever have to find which process messed up your night? If so, you might want to read on. I’m going to tell you how you can find it.

Granted, on small and/or meticulously managed systems tracking down the culprit is probably not a big deal. You can likely identify your process simply by checking what processes have enough privileges to send mysqld a HUP/KILL/TERM signal. However, frequently we see cases where this may not work or the elimination process would be too tedious to execute.

We recently had a case where a process was frequently sending SIGHUPs to mysqld and the customer asked us to see if we could get rid of his annoyance. This blog is the direct result of a discussion I had with my colleague …

The MySQL KILL command as the name suggests kills queries that are running.

After identifying the Id using the SHOW PROCESSLIST command, the User of the connection/thread or a database user with SUPER privileges can execute KILL [id]; to remove the connection/thread.

However, there is an ability to kill just the query that is being executed rather the entire connection. The default when not specified is to kill the connection, however you can optional specify the CONNECTION or QUERY keywords.

For example, below is an interactive test.

Thread 1:

mysql> select sleep(10);

Thread 2:

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------+------+---------+------+-----------+------------------+
| Id | User | Host      | db   | Command | Time | State     | Info             | …

It”s not the most common task in the world, but you might want to view processes from a particular user and once in a while you might even need to kill processes from a single user, be it during an attack or because you simply got a bug in an application bombarding your db server with connections!

Here is a small stored procedure which does exactly that!

call process_list("show","username","hostname");

– shows all processes owned by username@hostname

call process_list("kill","username","hostname");

– kills all processes owned by username@hostname

The code for this stored procedure can be found below. If you have any comments / suggestions feel free to comment below.

######################################################################
##                                        …

Few days ago I worked on some customer’s server and there was a problem - their nfs server went down and we were forced to change some settings on their FC4 clients to prevent shares from dieing because of kernel bug. But when we’ve changed settings in /etc/fstab there was one more step before task was completed - we need to remount this share (I mean unmount/mount). But how to perform this operation if there are some processes in D (non-interruptible sleep) waiting for dead share and prevent it from unmounting? They wait because of hard option on the share and lack of intr option and any unmount request would produce a following results:

streaming01:~# umount /storages/2
umount: /storages/2: device is busy
umount: /storages/2: device is busy

So, here is a list of steps you need to do to be able to remount your share.

First of all, you need to send KILL(9) signal to all you processes …

Was really surprised today when heard really funny rap song about “kill -9″ Unix command:

• Video is here.
• Lyrics is here.
• Audio record is here.